Wine Country And Horses

Many many home buyers in Sonoma County live out of the area–they buy second homes here, they are relocating for work, or want to experience life in the wine country first hand.

Many home buyers, even if they are local, conduct much or their search on line. Why not have as much of the purchase transaction paperwork be conducted on line too?

This struck home this afternoon as I prepared an offer for out of town clients to sign. Their scanner was older and it was not easy to assemble the pages to fax back to me–believe me I had the same problem before I got a new scanner. What a tedious process for them!

Or I have had illegible faxes come through as a result of too many generations of faxing and scanning of counter offers and counters to counters, ad infinitum. Every one involved tears their hair out and runs around wasting time on mechanics of the paperwork, when it is the content of the documents that is most important! Pretty silly.

Enter the paperless transaction, beginning with the electronic signing of contract documents. It is easier than it might sound! What is an electronic signature?

An electronic signature is any legally recognised electronic means that indicates that a person adopts the contents of an electronic message.

There is a better way. Our new paperless transaction system at Prudential California Realty will be rolled out company wide in the first quarter. Hallelujah!!!!!! So many trees will be saved and countless hours chasing paperwork with also be saved by realtors and their clients.

My client asked me about electronic signing–what does it mean? What does it look like? What are the basic facts? You can click on the link above for a Wikipedia article about the concept of electronic signatures.

For more specifics, here is a link to the system we will be using, Docusign by Ziplogix.

Here is a brief (2 minute) and not too fancy overview of how you, as a buyer or seller, would use Docusign to sign documents electronically. I’ll have more posts about the whole process of greening the real estate transactions and preventing grey hairs for all the parties involved!